Double Dare

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Adventures of Tintin.”

Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in David Fincher’s new movie.Credit Illustration by Luis Grañena

You can’t take your eyes off Rooney Mara as the notorious Lisbeth Salander, in the American movie version of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (opening December 21st). Slender, sheathed in black leather, with short ebony hair standing up in a tuft, her fingers poking out of black woollen gloves as they skitter across a laptop keyboard, Mara (who played Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend at the beginning of “The Social Network”) cuts through scene after scene like a swift, dark blade. Salander is a twenty-four-year-old hacker with many piercings, of herself and of others. She’s both antisocial and intensely sexual—vulnerable and often abused but overequipped to take revenge. She lives in an aura of violence. Salander obviously accounts for a big part of the success of Larsson’s crime novels—both men and women are turned on by her—and Mara makes every scene that she appears in jump. She strips off and climbs right onto Daniel Craig, as Mikael Blomkvist, the investigative journalist who takes Salander on as a partner, and whom she makes her lover. Craig looks a little surprised. In this movie, he is modest, quiet, even rather recessive. It’s Mara’s shot at stardom, and he lets her have it.

Much of the movie is set on a private island controlled by the Vanger clan, a wealthy Swedish industrial family peopled with criminals, perverts, solitaries, exiles, dead Nazis, and a grieving old man, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), who has never got over the disappearance of his grandniece, forty years earlier. In one last attempt to find her, he hires Blomkvist, who has been temporarily discredited in a libel suit, and sets him up as an investigator on the island, a place that no American one-per-cent family would ever dream of owning. It’s way up north, windy, snowy, and treacherously beautiful; once you cross the bridge to this enclave, you enter an icy hell. Blomkvist and Salander, warming each other, conduct their investigation from the island, hacking into whatever files they need; they leave only when they have to, with Mara, head down in the wind, tearing around Sweden on a motorcycle like—well, like a bat out of hell. The movie zips ahead, in short, spiky scenes punctuated by skillfully edited montages of digitized photographs and newspaper articles. David Fincher, who directed the picture (working with Steven Zaillian’s screenplay), moves at a much faster pace than he did in “Zodiac,” his 2007 movie about a murder investigation. In “Zodiac,” every time a piece of evidence trembles into view, it quickly recedes again. That movie is an expression of philosophical despair: the truth can never be known. “Dragon Tattoo” says the opposite: it celebrates deduction, high-end detective work—what Edgar Allan Poe called “ratiocination.” Everything can be known if you look long and hard enough, especially if you have no scruples about hacking into people’s bank accounts, e-mails, and business records. Salander is a criminal, but she’s our criminal.

At heart, of course, the material is pulpy and sensational. The Vanger men committed atrocious crimes against women in the past, and Salander, who is a ward of the state, is twice brutalized by a smarmy social worker who controls her money. There are certainly lurid moments, but I wouldn’t say that Fincher exploits the material. When Salander is raped, the scene registers as a horror; it’s prolonged and discomforting. And her revenge, however justified, and however much it may amuse the audience, is another horror. This is a bleak but mesmerizing piece of filmmaking; it offers a glancing, chilled view of a world in which brief moments of loyalty flicker between repeated acts of betrayal.

In “The Adventures of Tintin,” Steven Spielberg, working with 3-D animation and motion-capture techniques, produces the cohesion of a superbly made real-life movie (also opening December 21st). There are closeups, overheads, point-of-view sequences, a moving camera within the frame, and the shots—if that’s what you call them—flow smoothly from one to the next. Visually, the movie has ease and speed and lift, and, for about an hour, it’s an exhilarating ride. The screenwriters, Steven Moffat and the team of Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, pulled the story together from three of the classic Tintin books, written by the Belgian comic-book artist Hergé: “The Crab with the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn,” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure.” The plot is standard boy’s-book adventure stuff. Tintin (Jamie Bell), the young reporter with an orange-brown quiff and insatiable curiosity, pursues a buried treasure, journeying to the far corners by ship, plane, and motorcycle. He’s accompanied by the bearded, alcoholic sea captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), and both of them are menaced by the vicious Sakharine (Daniel Craig, again). The opera diva Bianca Castafiore, a coiffed and generously bosomed regular feature of the books, makes a guest appearance and warbles Rossini, shattering every wineglass, fish tank, and chandelier in sight—which is special fun in 3-D. These characters have enough temperament to keep the story scurrying. “The Adventures of Tintin” is a virtual non-stop scramble of running, jumping, swinging, dangling, plunging, and flying.

All the characters have smooth skin that looks like brushed rubber; they’re halfway between puppets and humans in appearance. As they move, they seem to float slightly, as if, like ballet dancers, their momentum carried them past ordinary human ability. Yet they aren’t completely unfettered, like the hand-drawn characters in an old cartoon or the digitally enhanced, real-life figures in a schlock spectacle like “Green Lantern.” Tintin doesn’t possess supernatural powers: the ground exists, though he doesn’t stay on it for long; the walls remain impenetrable. The play between fantasy and realism is what gives the film its special look. Spielberg and his collaborators (Peter Jackson was the producer) have come up with the equivalent of Hergé’s clean-limbed, lean-forward manner (the characters in Hergé’s comic books seem always to be moving into the next panel). The animators labored for two years establishing settings—a street, a ship, a Moroccan city—and then the actors worked in a featureless room with reflectors attached to their bodies while dozens of digital cameras all around them picked up their movements. The animators used the movements—shrugs, strains, thrusts—to build the animated version of the characters, and added the completed figures to the preset backgrounds. The technique is similar to the one that James Cameron used for “Avatar,” but the look is drier, plainer, airier.

Hergé began the Tintin series in 1929, and the time period of his stories overlaps with that of Spielberg’s design obsession: the modern moment of the nineteen-thirties, with its pontooned seaplanes and its long-hooded cars. In “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Indiana Jones battled foes amid such svelte machines as a Mercedes Nazi staff car. Spielberg uses these mechanical stunners for his special brand of eccentric physical movement; in “Raiders,” when the flying-wing airplane, grounded and moored to the spot, kept circling, Indy, fighting some lout, ducked every time the whirling propellers swung around. In the new movie, Tintin and Haddock crash-land in the desert, and the propeller of their little seaplane keeps turning, wreaking havoc before it finally dies. Spielberg prizes his echoes. Haddock and Sakharine have a rivalry that goes back three hundred years: their ancestors crossed swords on the deck of a burning three-master. In the present, they duel with the giant, swivelling cranes at a ship’s loading dock.

The great thing about “The Adventures of Tintin” is that it never stops moving—and the terrible thing about it is that it never stops moving. The filmmakers got so caught up in the look they wanted to achieve that they forgot something essential: comic-book characters need fleshing out to fill a hundred-and-ten-minute movie. Who is Tintin? What does he want? Does he have a soul? And does Haddock ever think about anything besides his next drink? He’s a roaring, cursing bore—so redundant and uninteresting that I longed for Sakharine to do him in. The characters’ temperaments are entirely physical. After about an hour, I lost interest in the picture, something that never happens with Pixar’s animated movies, which have actual stories, not just strung-together tumbles, as well as social themes to chew over. “Tintin” is exhausting, and, for all its wonders, it wears one out well before it’s over. ♦

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